Biography

I am a painter and visual artist without a formal art background.

My very earliest work focused on architectural drawings, intricate renditions of birds, and photo-realistic portraiture. As a teen, I was inspired by the organic, swirly, alphabet-soup compositions of Toulouse-Lautrec’s poster art. That led to the creation of a long-standing series of hand-lettered posters for the historic Cain’s Ballroom in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Several of these dozens of works were included in Paul Grushkin’s 1987 compendium, The Art of Rock: Posters from Presley to Punk.

Subsequent years saw the development of a career in the graphic arts and graphic design to meet the requirements of marketable skills, though I never veered far from a personal immersion in all things art related. When I obtained an associate’s degree in computer animation from The Art Institute of Houston in 1997, I found that the electronic medium opened new vistas for me. It sparked free-form improvisation, and offered an alternative approach to the manipulation of tone and mood. I switched processes and began using pigmented inks on paper and canvas, and dispersed dyes on aluminum. When my work came full circle back to its more traditional roots, working with paint and mixed media on canvas and panel, the extemporaneous fluidity of the digital zeitgeist remained a key element of my approach to art.